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Purpose The ultimate goal of anomia treatment should be to achieve gains in exemplars trained in the therapy session, as well as generalization to untrained exemplars and contexts. The purpose of this study was to test the efficacy of phonomotor treatment, a treatment focusing on enhancement of phonological sequence knowledge, against semantic feature analysis (SFA), a lexical-semantic therapy that focuses on enhancement of semantic knowledge and is well known and commonly used to treat anomia in aphasia. Method In a between-groups randomized controlled trial, 58 persons with aphasia characterized by anomia and phonological dysfunction were randomized to receive 56-60 hr of intensively delivered treatment over 6 weeks with testing pretreatment, posttreatment, and 3 months posttreatment termination. Results There was no significant between-groups difference on the primary outcome measure (untrained nouns phonologically and semantically unrelated to each treatment) at 3 months posttreatment. Significant within-group immediately posttreatment acquisition effects for confrontation naming and response latency were observed for both groups. Treatment-specific generalization effects for confrontation naming were observed for both groups immediately and 3 months posttreatment; a significant decrease in response latency was observed at both time points for the SFA group only. Finally, significant within-group differences on the Comprehensive Aphasia Test-Disability Questionnaire (Swinburn, Porter, & Howard, 2004) were observed both immediately and 3 months posttreatment for the SFA group, and significant within-group differences on the Functional Outcome Questionnaire (Glueckauf et al., 2003) were found for both treatment groups 3 months posttreatment. Discussion Our results are consistent with those of prior studies that have shown that SFA treatment and phonomotor treatment generalize to untrained words that share features (semantic or phonological sequence, respectively) with the training set. However, they show that there is no significant generalization to untrained words that do not share semantic features or phonological sequence features.

Purpose An increasing number of anomia treatment studies have coupled traditional word retrieval accuracy outcome measures with more fine-grained analysis of word retrieval errors to allow for more comprehensive measurement of treatment-induced changes in word retrieval. The aim of this study was to examine changes in picture naming errors after phonomotor treatment. Method Twenty-eight individuals with aphasia received 60 hr of phonomotor treatment, an intensive, phoneme-based therapy for anomia. Confrontation naming was assessed pretreatment, immediately posttreatment, and 3 months posttreatment for trained and untrained nouns. Responses were scored for accuracy and coded for error type, and error proportions of each error type (e.g., semantic, phonological, omission) were compared: pre- versus posttreatment and pretreatment versus 3 months posttreatment. Results The group of treatment participants improved in whole-word naming accuracy on trained items and maintained their improvement. Treatment effects also generalized to untrained nouns at the maintenance testing phase. Additionally, participants demonstrated a decrease in proportions of omission and description errors on trained items immediately posttreatment. Conclusions Along with generalized improved whole-word naming accuracy, results of the error analysis suggest that a global (i.e., both lexical-semantic and phonological) change in lexical knowledge underlies the observed changes in confrontation naming accuracy following phonomotor treatment.

Purpose: This study investigated the relationship between non-orthographic language abilities and reading in order to examine assumptions of the primary systems hypothesis and further our understanding of language processing poststroke., Method: Performance on non-orthographic semantic, phonologic, and syntactic tasks, as well as oral reading and reading comprehension tasks, was assessed in 43 individuals with aphasia. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to determine the relationship between these measures. In addition, analyses of variance examined differences within and between reading groups (within normal limits, phonological, deep, or global alexia)., Results: Results showed that non-orthographic language abilities were significantly related to reading abilities. Semantics was most predictive of regular and irregular word reading, whereas phonology was most predictive of pseudohomophone and nonword reading. Written word and paragraph comprehension were primarily supported by semantics, whereas written sentence comprehension was related to semantic, phonologic, and syntactic performance. Finally, severity of alexia was found to reflect severity of semantic and phonologic impairment., Conclusions: Findings support the primary systems view of language by showing that non-orthographic language abilities and reading abilities are closely linked. This preliminary work requires replication and extension; however, current results highlight the importance of routine, integrated assessment and treatment of spoken and written language in aphasia., Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7403963.

Purpose: The ultimate goal of aphasia therapy should be to achieve gains in function that generalize to untrained exemplars and daily conversation. Anomia is one of the most disabling features of aphasia. The predominantly lexical/semantic approaches used to treat anomia have low potential for generalization due to the orthogonality of semantic and phonologic representations; this has been borne out in a meta-analysis of treatment studies. The intensive, neurally distributed, phonologic therapy reported here can, in principle, generalize to untrained phonologic sequences because of extant regularities in phonologic sequence knowledge and should, in principle, generalize to production of words trained as well as those untrained., Method: Twenty-six persons with chronic aphasia due to stroke were treated, in a staggered (immediate vs. delayed treatment) open trial design, with 60 hr of intensive, multimodal therapy designed to enhance access to and efficiency of phonemes and phonologic sequences., Results: There was an absolute increase of 5% in confrontation naming of "untrained" nouns at 3 months, and there were 9% to 10% increases on measures of generalization of phonologic processes., Conclusion: The results of this trial demonstrate generalization of training effects on laboratory measures, which were sustained at 3 months, and provide support for the theories that motivated the treatment.

Purpose: The integrity of selective attention in people with aphasia (PWA) is currently unknown. Selective attention is essential for everyday communication, and inhibition is an important part of selective attention. This study explored components of inhibition-both intentional and reactive inhibition-during spoken-word production in PWA and in controls who were neurologically healthy (HC). Intentional inhibition is the ability to suppress a response to interference, and reactive inhibition is the delayed reactivation of a previously suppressed item., Method: Nineteen PWA and 20 age- and education-matched HC participated in a Stroop spoken-word production task. This task allowed the examination of intentional and reactive inhibition by evoking and comparing interference, facilitation, and negative priming effects in different contexts., Results: Although both groups demonstrated intentional inhibition, PWA demonstrated significantly more interference effects. PWA demonstrated no significant facilitation effects. HC demonstrated significant reverse facilitation effects. Neither group showed significant evidence of reactive inhibition, though both groups showed similar individual variability., Conclusions: These results underscore the challenge interference presents for PWA during spoken-word production, indicating diminished intentional inhibition. Although reactive inhibition was not different between PWA and HC, PWA showed difficulty integrating and adapting to contextual information during language tasks.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to develop a short form of the Boston Naming Test (BNT; Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 2001) for individuals with aphasia and compare it with 2 existing short forms originally analyzed with responses from people with dementia and neurologically healthy adults., Method: Development of the new BNT-Aphasia Short Form and analysis of the other 2 forms were completed with archival data from 100 individuals with aphasia. The authors developed the BNT-Aphasia Short Form using items from the original 60-item instrument based on item response theory. Rasch analysis was computed on the short forms developed by Graves, Bezeau, Fogarty, and Blair (2004) and by Mack, Freed, Williams, and Henderson (1992)., Results: Analysis of the Graves et al. (2004) short form resulted in the smallest range of item difficulty and the largest floor effect compared with the Mack et al. (1992) short form and the BNT-Aphasia short form. The BNT-Aphasia Short Form showed an increase in information in the middle of the scale relative to both the Graves et al. and the Mack et al. forms., Conclusions: The new short form demonstrates good psychometric properties when used with individuals with aphasia. However, the Mack et al. form proved to be as psychometrically sound as the BNT-Aphasia Short Form and is also appropriate for individuals with aphasia.